Heidegger and Kierkegaard <i>An Investigation into the Original Elements of Heidegger</i>'<i>s Philosophy</i>

It is only slightly hyperbolic to say that Jean Wahl's "Heidegger and Kierkegaard: An Investigation into the Original Elements of Heidegger's Philosophy" legitimized Soren Kierkegaard in French academia and inaugurated French existentialism as such. 1 First published in 1932/1933 in Recherches Philosophiques, "perhaps the most significant [journal] of its time,"(2) it was republished in 1938 as an appendix to Etudes kierkegaardiennes, which would go on to become the most important book on Kierkegaard in France. Wahl's article laid the groundwork for the anthropological, humanist reading of Martin Heidegger by showing how Heidegger's philosophy must be seen as an attempt to ontologize and secularize Kierkegaard's more religiously tinged thought. 3 At the same time, and thanks precisely to Heidegger's philosophy, it revealed that Kierkegaard was a serious philosophical thinker in his own right. It is no accident that Jean-Paul Sartre cites it approvingly in a discussion of Kierkegaard and Heidegger in Being and Nothingness.(4)

Beyond its historical significance, Wahl's essay also stands out for being at once a succinct, admirable overview of Heidegger's early philosophy and a penetrating critique of issues still debated by Heidegger scholars today. In just over twenty pages of French text, "Heidegger and Kierkegaard" nearly spans the gamut of matters philosophical: temporality, spatiality, freedom, possibility, authenticity, objectivism, mortality, subjectivism, idealism, realism, ontology, and truth all come in for discussion. Wahl also begins to raise questions about Heidegger's philosophy that he will develop in essays, reviews, and lecture courses over the next four decades, questions concerning its theological under pinnings, its solitary emphasis on death, its deprecation of Lebensphilosophie, its "scholastic" abstraction, its prioritization of the future, and its relationship to time in general. Finally, in characteristic style, we see Wahl bringing thinkers into dialogue over the most fundamental issues. In this essay alone, there are more than just passing remarks on Nietzsche, Jaspers, Bergson, and Hegel. Already in 1932-33, Wahl established for the world that Kierkegaard and Heidegger must be counted among such great philosophical thinkers.